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8.10.2013

more blue :-)



Self-portrait with blue guitar, David Hockney


"Literature has been a mainspring of some of his most important and interesting pictures: in the 1960s he made a series of etchings inspired by Cavafy’s poems, and one of his most complex self-portraits, Self-Portrait with Blue Guitar (1977) came out of etchings he produced to illustrate Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’. This wonderfully self-referential portrait shows how many levels Hockney’s work can have: the Stevens poem itself was inspired by Picasso’s The Old Guitarist (1903), and the layers of inspiration are represented here by the realistic blue curtain which is pulled aside to reveal the artist, working at a table to produce a Picasso-esque outline of a blue guitar, while sitting on a cartoon-like outline of a chair, poised inside a child’s outline of a house, watched over by his own signature tulips and a bust of Dora Maar."


J. Flanders



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2 comments:

  1. ahhh.... you've got a nice blue curtain theme going there and i messed it up.

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  2. actually i was thinking that it is interesting that there are so many blue windows/curtains in literature and art, more than any other colours, or no? maybe i am partial here :-)

    maybe you should post the wonderful blue window after that, and then we have to continue with more blue windows :-)

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